Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Into the World, the Hallways of Wraith

Oh jeez, I've been meaning to make this post for a while now but there has been simply no time. I've tried for the past several days but never is there enough time for a proper post.

First thing's first: Insomnia has been downloaded over ten thousand times in the past ten days. That's an average of 5149.5 downloads a day and that's fantastic.

My ego has swelled to the size of a red giant and I'm loving it. My life means something again, I am the artist supreme. Now I'm starting to have delusions of godhood (or at least demi-dietyhood).

(This is how I've felt since Insomnia's release.)

Of course, the euphoria of unquestionable success hasn't been without a grain of salt. I've gotten quite a few complaints from map aficionados from the Garry's Mod Toybox:

"Paranoia was so scary and cool but this is just weird with action"-006 spy killerCCPC/CP Commander

"I think I prefere paranoia better, this is missing something, I dont know what though."-Straight Up Lazy

"I've didn't like this map, I prefered Paranoia. Insomnia isn't scaring and is very easy and short.

2/10 "-Nicholas Da Costa

"wasnt that fun. he lost the mojo in this.i like parania better."

Now that's all fine and dandy, I don't mind if people like Paranoia more. I mean, I love Paranoia as my first born map. But keep in mind, Insomnia wasn't really meant to be scary. Paranoia was scary, but I dropped all pretenses of horror in it's sibling and opted instead to open the floodgates of abstraction and spill as much weirdness as possible into a single map.

Also, I'm not too into the whole "constructive criticism" thing. If a map shows promise and you have good ideas on how to make it better then by all means share them. Of course, if a map is bad, simply god-awful, then by all means call it bad and leave at that. Brevity is the soul of wit.

On the other hand, if you're talking about a masterpiece like Insomnia, especially when it's made by a God-Emperor, then you had better have something better than "lost the mojo". That simply will not do. It makes it sound like I misplaced some exotic salsa or worse, became infertile. And that's terrible.

Now, that's not to say the response has been overwhelmingly negative. Like every masterpiece from denÜbermenschen, there will be nay-sayers. It's an unfortunate fact of life. It's exactly what happened when Atlas Shrugged was written, or when Citizen Kane was filmed or even when writing was invented.